My work is always to do with the relationship between the film and the audience and the space it’s shown in, and the way the space presents the audience with a different way of understanding the work.

First I’ll talk about my own work. I showed work in Ian White’s Three to the Power of Three season of films at the Ciné Lumière at the Institut Français. I was showing a piece of work called Reversion of the Beast Folk (12 mins, video, UK, 2003) that was originally made for a gallery context. I was interested in the film directly responding to the viewing space so that people would have a sense of self-consciousness. For me the difference between cinema and the gallery is to do with the sense of yourself in relation to the film. In a gallery you’ll come into the space, look at the space and you’ll see the walls and the windows and then the screen and what’s beyond the screen and what’s surrounding the screen. Often there’ll be other people and you’ll see them next to the piece of work and they might not even be looking at it. Cursively you are more aware of yourself watching the piece, whereas in the cinema, you go into the cinema and when the lights go down, you don’t see other people unless they’re causing some fuss or some noise and that’s not considered the right thing to do in the cinema.

Mainly what cinema audiences want is to be able to be absorbed by the screen and enter into the cinematic space rather than the cinema space. So what I was interested in doing in that piece was to bring the cinematic space into the cinema so that you would become aware again of the cinema. Towards the end of the film there’s just a musical interlude where the image ends and then there’s music, Brazilian Umbanda music, which is used for religious rituals for the entity Pombagira. When the cinema went black because the image ended, the cinema light was replaced with floodlights shining in from outside the cinema. Along one wall there were windows which were covered with a roller blind. So the blind raised up very, very slowly to reveal really bright pink flood lights, like stadium lights, lighting the place in this pink luminescence. Also the light was coming from the wrong direction, from the side. So it made people literally turn to have a look.

Well, in the gallery, because people are already aware of the space I was thinking of bringing it the other way, so that the film is brought into the gallery space architecturally. I built this cave-like entrance, like a threshold to the white cube space. The whole space wasn’t done up to look like a cave, the film is shot in a cave, so I made an entranceway. When you came into the gallery you would see the film through a vista, the film screen was framed by the cave. When you came in through the cave entrance, you could sit on a sculpted polyurethane rock and watch the film. It related to a theme park ride in that kind of way, but it wasn’t quite that. It was more distorted than a theme park ride. The lights did come on at the end and so it changed the space again but you were still in the same kind of space, it was just that it was a different time zone, it was like the gallery suddenly goes to ‘Battle Stations’!

The light was there when I was editing it, as I always considered using something else to end the film. I was also reading Maya Deren’s diaries from her anthropological studies in Haiti. She made a step from her anthropological position to become a voodoo priestess. She said at that point that she was achieving more in her desire for progress through ritual dance than she could ever achieve through filmmaking in terms of things like time shifts and metaphoric relationships between different time schemas. So I was interested in taking her position into a real thing, so film was discarded at the end and replaced by dance music and lights to change the space more radically than the film possibly could. It would need intervention of people to actually get into it. Perhaps it shifts the space away from the screen at that point. It was always the desire to shift the screen into the room.

Yes, you’re part of a ritual rather than watching something. But it’s not really a described ritual; the grounding is there if you want to be in it. Actually Stuart Holme showed it in Rio in Brazil, after doing a reading from one of his books. When the Umbanda music came on everybody started getting up and were dancing to the music. And then he actually got invited to one of the religious rituals later that evening because of the work.

It’s an important part, although it did get shown once in Rotterdam as part of a screening without any additional lighting in a straightforward cinema with other short films. The blackness within the cinema did the same thing as with the light, in a different kind of way, but made people uncertain about what was happening. It provided a space that was outside the normal viewing situation, as the sound continues on for about three minutes it lends a cinematic anchor. It’s quite a long time to sit in the dark when you’re expecting to be given pictures.

Well, Midwatch (7 mins, video, UK, 2000) was shown originally in a cabin that I built extending from the corner of the gallery. It was an architectural intervention but in a different kind of way, here you had to enter into the box. It was made from charred wood; the only bit left uncharred showed an image of a battleship. It was like a negative of film, a negative emulsion as though a battleship had been somewhere between the box and a fictional nuclear blast.

In some way it’s extra to the film, so the film stands alone as well. In some ways it could be seen just like some artists who might have special frames made for a painting or insist on a particular way of hanging it. Some people prefer to hang their works lower because it creates a different relationship with the viewer. These sorts of things are not really talked about in video much. I mean people do specify, but it’s not really done with the same kind of attention or understanding of how meaning changes through that. Decisions for how to show video are usually made in terms of presenting luxury or practical things to do with sound absorption rather than what it actually means to present works in different ways.

Yeah, that was interesting. Parreno is quite interesting. He often does those things between cinema and sculpture or the space that they’re showing in. The thing about ‘Stories Are Propaganda’ is that they had painted the title, like graffiti, on the curtain.

I think anyone can demand these things. Especially off a show like that. For instance, I’m not on the biennale circuits, and when I do show things in a museum kind of situation, they are actually happier to have exact things because it’s not their role to have to think creatively as artists about how to show work. Unless you’re showing something that is straightforward for them to deal with in their space, like a single-screen work, then they are happy to get more exact instructions.

Well, in most gallery shows I’ve been in there sometimes have been things which I’ve not been so happy with. Like when I arrive to see my work on monitors with headphones. It just doesn’t work. Listen, curators – it doesn’t work! Nobody will pick up the headphones and if somebody has picked up the headphone, the other person can’t hear. It’s a dead end trap.

Yes, it needs to be a piece that’s made for headphones and it has to be something to do with lots of people watching in silence and one person being able to hear it. You could set up some interesting social dynamic around that, something to do with deafness and privileged knowledge.